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Psionics again? I'm not certain if this subject is taboo or not.


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I don't expect anything to happen with psionics in X2, as cool as they are, even the alien's side of it is being downplayed. This is just me throwing out ideas and seeing what other people think of them.

In X-Com, psionics is extremely overpowered. Similarly, in XCOM and XCOM2, it can get really out of hand. The only time it plays well is when you only have one or two psionically capable soldiers throughout the whole base because a mind controlled alien is just a stupid swing in power and being able steal half an alien group is worth so much more than just killing half an alien group. So you have to limit it. This is something XCOM2 did extremely well by making it so that only one soldier (or two with an upgrade) can be psionically trained at a time. I still dislike it, however, since you don't have to put those soldiers out into the field even once for them to be viable and you don't get the joy of turning one of your best soldiers into someone who can use psionics. Only nameless, faceless rookies who sit in a box for a month and emerge as a god.

Panic and mind control being your only two options kinda forces you make your soldiers overpowered. XCOM2 also does better here because there's a wealth of abilities to gain from psionics that are so much more supporty than dominating an alien unit. While this is great for gameplay, I dislike that no one on the alien team can use soulfire for guaranteed damage. I'd hate it even more if the aliens were able to just get free damage on me, though. So you'd need to give your soldiers abilities that would still be fun if the aliens had them yet are only powerful enough that a psi soldier is really only there as support instead of god. With that in mind, these are my ideas:

  • Psionic Awareness: Basically, being able to see where nearby enemies are provided they aren't robots or are psionic themselves. This actually leads to some nice granularity since the more skill you get in this regard, the more you can see without having a line of sight. Where the aliens might even employ mind shields to hide some units so you don't rely on it and you get a nice way of hiding your own soldiers from the lesser psi capable enemies. It also helps explain why aliens can cast panic on you without you being able to see them. This would be the most basic ability granted from just holding the gift, making it better is a matter of doing missions.
  • Psi Attack (chance to cause damage, panic, freeze, or charm): Nothing to change for panic. I miss psi strength from the original game. It was fun to weed out rookies by taking guesses on how easily they panic when going up against ethereals and then later on learning who can naturally resist them with the psi-lab. I never liked how a human's strength can range from all powerful god to frail little insect here. I'd rather a system where humans only vary a little bit; some might be stronger than the Greys but no one comes close to the prators. If you want to panic, mind control, or even see them psionically, you're going to need all the strength, tech, and skill you can muster.
    • Freeze: Slightly better than panic because it doesn't risk them shooting your soldiers or throwing grenades at you. That said, it's always felt weird that the aliens can throw grenades. Humans are unique on the entire planet because our shoulders can make accurate and strong throws of small rocks. Even the other sentients who evolved alongside us lacked the ability to throw a spear anything close to as good as we can. It'd be cooler if alien grenades had to be launched rather than thrown. Gives a nice tech to research, too. Should probably be undone if the person running the attack gets shot or killed.
    • Charm: A less overpowered variant of mind control and the only one likely to be successful without group effort. All you do is swap their allegiance so they shoot at your enemy instead of you, or don't shoot at you if no one else is around. A lot of cRPGs have something like this and it seems to work well there, plus when it hits you, you don't have to worry too much about being hit by them since you can just say a charmed unit has bad stats. Could be evil if there's guy with a rocket launcher or heavy machine gun, though. Since the aliens basically don't get rocket launchers, I'm not against making it so that a charmed soldier always misses with them.
  • Psi Storm: Basically like psi attack but with worse chances of success and area of effect. Like a grenade for panic and for throwing into the final room of an alien ship when you don't know where everyone is.
  • Mind Control: Exactly what it says on the tin. As fun as it is, it's a big issue to code in all the ways the enemy should be using mind control against you. IE, suicide grenades, dropping weapons and running into the open, making you a nice complacent target to hit. I'd imagine this is an ability that requires all of a soldier's TUs to maintain so it's only ever something you use to make the aliens feel wildly out of position and have tons of fun with. Grey commanders get essentially frozen while using it while Prators can still act. Like mind controlling an ethereal in XCOM:EU, I imagine this to be an ability that only works if your target has already be weakened. Either through stress, stun, or being the at the front of psi attacks. Mind Control sometimes runs into the huge problem of not knowing which alien you need to kill to get your guy back, at least when done the X-Com way. This is the greatest asset of the purple glowy thread of XCOM2. You can fight it because you know exactly who you need to disrupt or kill to save your friend. It's not very pretty and it's a bit weird that you can see them without even knowing how psionics works, but this would be a great opportunity to limit mind control to prators since by then, you'd hopefully have some psionically aware soldiers who could just follow the thread back or better yet..
  • Solace: Basically a way to get people back under your control. This is what's missing for psionics to be fun to fight against. Pitting you in a battle of skill and strength over your friend's life and getting those beautiful TUs back. Can also undo freezing, charm, and if you're friend is psionic, it can act as a group mind for doing more tricksy things.

Actually, now that I've written this much out. It feels really lame. Imagining how it would fit into the UI isn't very fun and I'm uncertain about the method of tying into elerium cores with limited charges for each mission.

I don't know. Let's see if I ctrl-a, backspace all of this before I press submit. Eh.. Screw it. I really like psionic awareness as a mechanic.

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personally I prefer it if they keep psionics an alien only maneuver, and add in the requirement that the aliens would only be able to execute psionic attacks from a source that can visibly see the player characters. personally I don't mind high tech soldiers that can shoot a musquito's balls off at 100 yards...however I would be less invested if my squad turns into X-men with magic fireballs and mindreaders running around

I also generally oppose over-saturation with guaranteed hit effects, if the player gets any skill, weapon or tool that is guaranteed to hit and damage the enemy...they are likely to spam the living daylights out of it. this is obvious in X-com, where the destroy cover>nail it with your gun approach is near guaranteed to land in later zones. on top of the high popularity of skills like soulfire, stasis, null lance, combat protocol etc etc. basically most skills that boost guaranteed hit maneuvers, nades, heavy weapons or are guaranteed hits themselves 

If the AI just gets a lot of units that don't care about cover or accuracy (by having guaranteed hit abilities or super armor) you basically get the situation that you have to burst them down or they will start killing people, rendering cover and gunplay moot. this is a problem in the higher levels of X-com2 where a lot of endgame enemies don't really care about cover and have abilities that are guaranteed to damage soldiers when they are used. 

 

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I like psionics, I hate psionics pertaining to mind control, especially when the psi-alien CAN'T EVEN SEE ME.

In none of the descriptions has it been told that the aliens have a 'hive mind' situation (specifically for psi-capable aliens in this instance).  Since that is not the case, an alien should at least have line of sight on you, OR if we're going the route of if one alien sees you all aliens see you (which I think is complete BS), then once an alien CAN'T see you, psi should no longer be capable.

Psi attacks are great, causing soldiers to panic, go berserk, or even doing damage via psi is perfectly fine.  Hell, even using it to buff friendly aliens would be cool.  Mind Control has got to go though.  There is absolutely nothing fun about playing russian roulette when landing at a mission - will one or more of my soldiers get MC'd and murder the rest of them, leaving me with nothing but a bunch of rookies back at base? 

Along that same vein, I don't think eventually giving you gear that makes you immune to psi is a good idea either.  It then makes psi-capable aliens just about useless.  The morale system, where the more you're attacked the more you can resist, is a great way of doing it.  If you eventually become immune that way, at least you earned it.

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The most fun thing about mind control is getting to use it yourself. I'm not certain it should enter the game until you at least have a counter, but if you're gonna put it in, the player should be allowed to steal allegiance themselves. I don't really like how mindshields make you completely immune to everything psi (and even things like panic) in the new XCOMs. Risk is the name of the game, and that means both for failure and success on all sides. That said, I didn't mind the Neural Dampening MELD mod you could put on in XCOM:EW, perhaps that's just because of how late game it was and the fact that it precluded ALL psionics on that soldier.

I'm still trying to figure out why psi is so fun to use. Why it's so great to just.. Get an entirely new set of abilities in the last act of the game.

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Psi Healing: Like medkit, but can be done ranged. Upgraded skill may become AoE effect instead of doing higher heals.

Psychic Surgery: A slow, costy ability that restores "unhealable" hp.

Empathy: See enemy hp and/or role, if originally hidden.

Scrying: A sensor probe not limited by walls.

Clairvoyant: See further and/or wider.

Precognition: See enemy plan. The plan may change with player action. Cue Invisible Inc.

Retrocognition: Like motion tracker.

Daze: Reduce or Eliminate target overwatch.

Mind Trick: Make a unit immune to enemy overwatch.

Psi cloak / distorion: Reduce accuracy of non-mechanic enemies agaist a target or area.

Mind Shade: Same as above but used on enemy.

Pyrokinetic: Remotely start fire, put out fire, or ignite grenade.

Apportation / Psychokinesis Hand: Open/Close/Pickup/Move/Drop remotely. An ability to move a missed grenade would be nice, if they explode at end of turn like X1.

Psychokinesis Shield: Project an energy field that reduce damage (think mass effect)

Psychokinesis Push/Pull: Moving alies sounds like fun.

 

Note: If these sounds like magic, there is a good reason. They are easier to balance than panic and mind control.

Edited by Sheepy
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3 hours ago, Sheepy said:

Psi Healing: Like medkit, but can be done ranged. Upgraded skill may become AoE effect instead of doing higher heals.

Psychic Surgery: A slow, costy ability that restores "unhealable" hp.

Empathy: See enemy hp and/or role, if originally hidden.

Scrying: A sensor probe not limited by walls.

Clairvoyant: See further and/or wider.

Precognition: See enemy plan. The plan may change with player action. Cue Invisible Inc.

Retrocognition: Like motion tracker.

Daze: Reduce or Eliminate target overwatch.

Mind Trick: Make a unit immune to enemy overwatch.

Psi cloak / distorion: Reduce accuracy of non-mechanic enemies agaist a target or area.

Mind Shade: Same as above but used on enemy.

Pyrokinetic: Remotely start fire, put out fire, or ignite grenade.

Apportation / Psychokinesis Hand: Open/Close/Pickup/Move/Drop remotely. An ability to move a missed grenade would be nice, if they explode at end of turn like X1.

Psychokinesis Shield: Project an energy field that reduce damage (think mass effect)

Psychokinesis Push/Pull: Moving alies sounds like fun.

 

Note: If these sounds like magic, there is a good reason. They are easier to balance than panic and mind control.

This sounds really good. As a further feature i would limit the useable psionic slots to 2 per soldier, learnable from a psionic center with all the "unlocked" psionic abilities at that time. This would add so much more depth and characteristic to a soldier. Imagine that sniper which can also heal, the soldier class which can throw down PSi cloaking, or a scout which can remove one overwatch with Daze. Or have a scout with heal abilities, or or or ... .

Psionic abilities are permanent and cant be removed, making it a permament choice for your soldier. Maybe wait a bit and unlock better psionic abilities to teach ? Or did you get your medic killed in the last mission and absolutely need a healing support ability RIGHT NOW ? I would also add a mastery curve for every ability, increasing effects as the soldier uses it in the battle, with a logarithmic mathematical function.

logarithmic-growth-curve.jpg?x32321

 

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Psionics are something I'd like to explore for Xenonauts-2, but it's something I'm not really thinking about now - it's one of those "icing on the cake" things I'd think about introducing in the final stages of development when I can afford to spend a bit of time tinkering with the ideas and see how well they work. It's notoriously hard to implement psionics as anything more interesting than purple mind bullets without breaking the game; lots of ideas sound really cool but break down a bit when you start to figure out exactly how they might work in the game.

I think they need to be tied more closely into the morale system - perhaps morale could even be your "mana" for casting psionic abilities, because it's exhausting and stressful using them. But I'm going to put psionics out of my mind until all the core features are done and the game is fun to play.

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